


Confabulation

by ELG



Series: Place of Safety series [1]
Category: X-Men (Original Timeline Movies)
Genre: Gen, Past Child Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-23
Updated: 2014-01-23
Packaged: 2018-01-09 18:31:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ELG/pseuds/ELG
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Logan is asked to save an abused teenage boy, but everything is not quite as it seems. </p><p>(Gen/pre-slash in this part with nothing romantic between Scott/Logan as yet.)</p><p>Written for the Scogan_5_Word_Challenge. 5 words: over, doubt, eye, double, safety.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Confabulation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scottxlogan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scottxlogan/gifts).



##### Place of Safety

##### I. Confabulation

Logan generally disliked smoothness in a man – at least, he presumed he did, as this one was setting his teeth on edge, but with his memory so addled it was difficult for him to be sure of anything. There was the present – sharp-edged, richly-defined, and all in color – and everything else, the day before and where he had been headed before this bar; this smoky haze of men who preferred not to go home until their brains were beer-blunted and this guy who wanted a favor from him; turned to sepia. The money being offered, however, was uncomplicated enough, and there didn't seem anything wrong about rescuing a traumatized teenage boy from a rich creep.

He looked again at the bank notes. "You're sure he's being abused?"

"He'll deny it, of course. Scared children cleave to what they know, even when what they know is cruelty, but you can look for yourself. Bruises don't lie. He needs someone to rescue him. Is there some reason why it shouldn't be you?"

He had no idea how this guy, who had just picked him out in a bar as a fellow mutant, should imagine that Logan was the kind of guy who wanted to save kids from their abusers. If asked, he would have denied it, but the thought had bedded in, all the same, that every hour he wasn't doing anything to help, horror might be happening to the kid.

Which was how he had come to be climbing over the windowsill of a teenage boy's bedroom in the middle of the night. He was aware, as he climbed up the trelliswork, of exactly what this looked like. Every human fear about mutants right there in the subtext: What do mutants do when not raping your womenfolk or eating your pets? Why, naturally, they're creeping into the bedrooms of your sleeping kids. Yeah, this was not something he wanted on his resumé.

He noticed the boy slept in wraparound sunglasses and guessed that was to do with his mutation. The kid was a light sleeper, so Logan had to act fast, clamping a hand across his mouth and then popping the claws in his free hand to scare him into obedience. That turned out to be overkill, turning an already spooked boy into someone terrified. Logan hastily popped the claws back in. "I'm not going to hurt you," he whispered, "But I need you to come with me."

He was careful not to disturb the glasses, as, still with a hand across his mouth, he took him by the scruff of his pyjama jacket and began to tug him towards the window. The kid started making stifled sounds of fear under his hand and Logan growled a warning to shut him up. He'd been given a tranquillizer to knock the kid out, but although investigating whether or not a kid was being abused was something he was willing to do on the say-so of a stranger, injecting some unknown substance into his veins was not.

He said sternly, "Kid, don't give me any trouble. I'm not going to hurt you and I'm not going to let anyone else hurt you either. I'm going to take you to a place where it's just you and me and I'm going to find out the truth. Understood?"

The kid just went on smelling terrorized and recently traumatized, and much like a cornered animal. He was darting glances around the room, desperate for an escape route. Given the kid's unstable scent, and that Logan had no idea how powerful his mutation might be, he decided that this was probably not going to work on the honor system. As firmly but kindly as he could, he slapped the gag he'd brought in his mouth, knotted it tight, and lashed his wrists in front of him, then, on the grounds that scared wild things sometimes calmed down if you kept them somewhere quiet and dark, he slipped a sack over his head. He said, also very firmly, "Don't struggle." The kid stopped fighting him immediately and Logan flinched a little at the way the fear scent cranked up in response to growled orders. Smooth or not, the guy in the bar had been right that the kid had been abused. This wasn't fear of the unknown. This was fear of the known all too well.

He slung him over his shoulder – one day the boy would probably be tall, but now he was just skinny – and clambered back down the trellis. Then, he carried him through the elegant grounds, past the gentle rain of fountains and the night-scented flower borders, to his far from elegant truck, put him carefully in the back on a blanket, covered him with another blanket and drove in exactly the opposite direction to the rendezvous he'd arranged with the stranger. Other half of the money be damned. No one got this kid, _no one_ , until Logan had taken a good look at him under a light and found out what it was that the kid himself wanted.

Driving, he kept listening, and the kid wasn't even whimpering now, he was keeping just as silent as Logan had told him to be, but Logan still gritted his teeth because he could smell salt, which meant the kid was crying with the fear he wasn't allowed to express.

 

As he carried him into the motel room, still wrapped in a blanket, and laid him on the bed, Logan couldn't help thinking that if it had been a normal kid snatched out of his bedroom in the middle of the night there would have been an alert out by now, but as it was a mutant kid gone missing, probably no one gave a rat's ass. No roadblocks on the intersections. No interest from the bored guy on reception who'd barely glanced at Logan’s ID as he handed over the key. This was exactly how difficult it was to grab a teenage mutant and drag him off to a beige-walled motel bedroom in the middle of the night.

He closed the drapes, switched on the lights, and then sat on the bed next to the boy and eased the hood off his head. He'd forgotten about the sunglasses, but, of course, they were still there, barriers between the kid's eyes and the world. He wondered which of them they were there to protect. He took off the gag gently so as not to hurt his mouth, but left his hands tied for now. Hopefully, Logan would get through to him quickly and he could untie him before he got stiff or bruised but doubt was already setting in. It wasn’t that he didn’t think the kid had been abused – looking at him it seemed more and more likely that he had been. It was just that he was such a pretty boy. Even with his eyes hidden, he still looked like a paedophile’s wet dream, with that sculpted mouth, and the bone structure of a boy who was going to grow up to be a beauty. No way was Logan handing this kid over to any man without a damned good reason, because already, as he looked at how fine his wrists were, how thin his arms, how he was huddled there on the bed, expecting horror, because someone had taught him that horror was what generally happened next, he was feeling a wave of protectiveness towards the boy. 

Lying tied up on the bed in a motel bedroom with a strange kidnapper looming over him, the boy gave a perfectly understandable gulp of fear and Logan said as clearly as he could, "You don't have to be scared. I know exactly what this looks like, but this isn't that, okay? That isn't what's going to happen here."

The boy wasn't listening. Too scared to take in a damned thing Logan had said to him, he had already stumbled into a tumult of words: "Please, please don't do this – not yet. If you could just wait a few days. I promise not to make any noise if you just wait a little while. I can't – Please, I can't right now – not again –"

Horror crawled right up his spine and Logan pulled the boy up by his skinny shoulders and held him. "Listen! Listen to what I'm saying to you. Concentrate."

And for some reason that seemed to get through. The boy gulped but stopped vomiting words at him.

Logan said, "Are you listening?"

"Yes."

"Good. My name's Logan. What's yours?"

The kid was shaking with fear and trying so damned hard to stop his teeth from chattering. "S-Scott."

"Okay, Scott. Someone told me a man was hurting you, and, because you were a mutant, and the authorities wouldn't care that you were being hurt, he asked me to rescue you. But I don't know him, and I don't know the guy who owns that big place you were being kept in, and I don't know you, so I've brought you here so I can take a look at you for myself and see what I think should be done with you."

Desperately, the kid said, "P-please don't let them experiment on me."

Logan reeled a little at that. Grimly, he said, "I won't."

"Don't let them send me back to the orphanage."

"Not if you don't want to go there. I need to take a look at you. Which means I need to look under your clothes. I'm not going to do anything else to you."

He could actually smell the point where the kid stopped believing him, and the worst part wasn't even the fear, it was the resignation, like this was going to happen and the next task in hand was just how to get through it. 

Logan folded back the blanket, lifted up the boy's pyjama jacket, and saw just what he'd been hoping not to see – all those welts and bruises. Some of the bruises were older than others and the same went for the welts, but there wasn't much of his back that had escaped. The freshest injuries were different again – claw marks and the symmetrical burns from what looked like a tazer. Gritting his teeth, he said, "What's the name of the guy who did this to you?"

"Jack Winters," the kid admitted in something that wasn't much above a whisper, like the guy was the Candyman and saying his name out loud would summon him.

"Was it his house you were staying in?"

"No. I ran away from him."

"Was he the guy at the orphanage?"

"No. He found me when I ran away from there."

So, the kid was an orphan who had run away from one place that scared the crap out of him straight into the arms of an abuser. "Why did you run away from the orphanage?"

"The man who ran it was experimenting on me. He experimented on me for years."

"Why did this Winters guy beat you?"

"To make me help him rob banks."

"You didn't want to do that?"

"No!" Desperate and torn right from the soul. "I don't want to hurt anyone. I want to help people."

"Okay. You ran away from the orphanage because they were experimenting on you, and then you ran away from this Winters guy because he was making you rob banks. How were you doing that?"

"I can fire force beams out of my eyes."

Well, that explained the sunglasses. Logan guessed the most direct path between two points was sometimes a scared kid with laser eyes, at least when you wanted to get into a bank vault. He said, "This Winters guy – did he have sex with you?"

"No, that was –"

The kid was too traumatized to finish the sentence; the shaking overwhelmed him and Logan found he was pulling him in against him and holding him tight, telling him it was okay, and they were nearly through this. Somehow he was tucking him under his chin and stroking some calm into his soft, dark hair. He could feel his warm, bony body shivering against his, while the poor kid gave off waves of shame and self-loathing. Only when the shuddering and crying finally subsided, did he say, "Scott, can you tell me what happened after you ran away from Winters?"

" _He_ found me. Another mutant. He was like an animal. He hunted me down through the school and he caught me and I begged him not to, but I knew he wanted to hurt me. He and a man called Stryker knocked me out and took me to another laboratory. There were lots of us mutants there. They kept us in cages. They experimented on us, then the first mutant came – the one like an animal. He said he was bored and he –" The kid started crying again, so ashamed that he was crying but not able to stop. Logan instinctively tightened his grip on him as the boy whispered: "It hurt so much. I didn't think anything could hurt so much. That's why I – please, if you could just wait…?"

Logan breathed in quickly, tensed for what was coming, and then let the scent in – and this close, with the kid in his arms, he could smell the blood and the bruised flesh and the sour scent of someone else's spent excitement. The disgust and anger was so overwhelming it almost made him gag. He said a very bad word and sliced through the rope around the boy's wrists, rubbing the circulation back into them while he swallowed down the first ten things he wanted to say. The kid just stayed shuddering against him like a snared rabbit and Logan reached out tentatively and touched the side of his face with the back of one finger, stroking his cheek gently as he said, "Scott. What's the name of the mutant who did…that to you?"

"Victor," the kid whispered, still shuddering. "He told me his name was Victor. He said I'd get to like it, but I didn't."

"No, I don't suppose you did," Logan said grimly. "What happened next?"

"Someone helped us escape from the compound. He opened all the cages. He sounded really mad."

"You didn't see him?"

"I was blindfolded but I think they may have experimented on him, too. He was very angry, and I think he may have had…claws."

The guy sounded like Logan’s double. Everyone was supposed to have a doppelganger, weren’t they? Perhaps that guy was his. Either way, the only male creatures in this narrative that Logan _didn't_ want to gut slowly so far were Scott himself and the angry guy who'd helped set him free.

"Then what happened?"

"We got away. I heard a voice in my head telling me where to go. I followed it and a man came to meet us."

"What did he do to you?" Logan said grimly.

"He took me home and said I was safe now." The kid sounded so wistful. 

"And then what happened?" At this point he was thinking that the kid had been forced to witness a black mass and then fed some baby flesh, probably before being gang-banged by a cult of mutant-torturing child molesters.

It was the first time the boy had turned his head in Logan's direction. In fact, for all he knew the kid had kept his eyes closed up tightly until this minute. He said tentatively, "You came and took me away."

Logan gaped at him. "What? You mean you were at voice-in-your-head guy's house tonight?"

"Yes. His name’s Charles Xavier."

"And he hasn't experimented on you or beaten you or made you have sex with him?"

"No." There was that wistful note again. "He was kind to me. He made me feel safe."

Well, even given the kid's inevitably very low standards when it came to acceptable father figures, rich guy did sound like a step up from all the other creeps. Logan let out his breath slowly, wondering which of the boy's abusers had been trying to sucker Logan into retrieving him tonight, or if that had been a whole new abuser who had some other sick thing he wanted to do to the kid. Whoever he had been, he had got Logan to break into the first place of safety this boy seemed to have known in years, and terrorize him all over again.

Gently, Logan said, "Scott, do you want me to take you back to where you were tonight? Do you think that guy can protect you from the others?"

Scott said bravely, "I think he'll try. No one else has since my Mom and Dad were killed." There was a fractional hesitation before he added, "Except…maybe…you."

Logan pulled the blanket up around the boy's shoulders and this time the kid showed savvy enough to clutch hold of it, so at least they seemed to have moved past the paralysing terror part of the getting-to-know-you process. Logan said awkwardly, "I'm sorry for kidnapping you from a place where you felt safe. And I'm sorry about what those other guys did to you. Do you want to go back to that Xavier guy's house?"

Scott nodded urgently, gulping. "Yes, please."

Logan helped him up off the bed and back out to the truck, Scott stumbling barefoot and still scared but desperate to get away from that bed; Logan only hesitated for a minute before he urged him in the passenger seat. The kid did his seatbelt up without being reminded and turned his head Logan's way. Logan wondered what his eyes were like behind the sunglasses – big and scared, he imagined. He was a sweet kid, despite everything he’d been through, but way too pretty to be orphaned and unprotected in a world that treated mutants like disposable garbage.

He said, "I'm taking you home now, Scott. Okay?"

The kid nodded and Logan could practically _feel_ him wanting to believe Logan was telling the truth, all the way back, looking out of the window, trying to calculate their position by the stars, a smart kid inside the traumatized one, and one, who, bizarrely, given his history, really wanted to believe the best of Logan. He gave an audible sigh of relief when they drove through the gateposts of the Xavier mansion, turned his head Logan's way again, and gave him a tremulous smile. Logan had to grit his teeth quite hard because this kid was so pathetically relieved just not to be fucked over by someone. 

Logan opened the truck door for Scott but this time let him get out himself. He took Scott's elbow and led him up to the front door, apologizing for the bare feet on gravel situation; not that the kid seemed to care. He was so happy to be coming home that he would have walked on burning coals. "I'll explain what happened to this Xavier guy," Logan told him. "I'll tell him that I took you, that you didn't run away."

A whole wave of relief came off the boy. The kid was so grateful for so damned little. Logan hoped Xavier got that and didn't start judging himself by this traumatized boy's standards. Scott was clearly ready to hero worship anyone who didn't actively abuse him. That didn't necessarily make the guy he was worshipping a hero.

When the door opened, Xavier turned out to be a bald guy in a wheelchair. He didn't even look at Logan, just beckoned Scott over for what was undoubtedly an entirely platonic hug that the kid really looked like he needed. The Professor smiled at the boy kindly and said, "Get yourself something to eat, Scott. You've had a busy night."

The boy gave Logan a shy wave and said, "Thank you, Logan." Then he was gone off into the enormous interior of this insanely opulent place.

Logan and Xavier looked at one another for a level pause and then Xavier nodded his head. "Thank you for caring enough to check up on Scott, and thank you for bringing him back."

"You do know he needs medical treatment? The kid was raped.”

“A friend of mine is flying in from Scotland to take care of him. For obvious reasons, he preferred a female doctor.”

He still felt curiously disinclined to let go. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust this guy – all his instincts were telling him that this was someone he could definitely trust – he just wasn’t quite ready to walk away from that kid yet. 

“And you know that after all the shit he’s been through he’s probably gonna need twenty years in therapy, right?"

"What is any one of us, Logan, but a work-in-progress…?"

 

Logan woke with a jolt and found himself in the Xavier mansion but not in that timeline or that part of it. He was lying on his bed in his room. The room he'd come up to while he decided what he was going to do now he was back from Alkali Lake. Somehow that had turned into an afternoon nap and that…memory? The shock took a moment to ebb away. That had happened? He had met Cyclops when he was a kid…? The shock was replaced by growing anger as he realized that, no, that hadn't happened. Or, at least, maybe some of the sick stuff that had been done to Scott Summers might have happened but Logan had sure as hell never been the friendly kidnapper who took him off to a motel at midnight to check he was okay. He had all his memories for the past fifteen years, and in that time he had never been to Xavier's place before the past month. 

He flung himself up off the bed, sprinted down the corridors, and slammed into Xavier's office, snarling, "Get the hell out of my head, Xavier!"

Xavier was looking much too calm and nothing like guilty enough for Logan. "I was not attempting to implant a false memory."

"Well, it sure as hell felt like that was what you were doing!"

"I was just showing you what _could_ have happened."

"Yeah. I could have been eaten by a great white shark or lost my testicles in a rotary saw accident – I don't need to know what that feels like either! Get out of my head and stay out of my head!" He slammed out of the study into the corridor, breathing hard, claws fully extended, to find scared kids scuttling past, trying not to catch his eye. He took a deep breath, pulled his claws back in, walked back into the room and this time closed the door. Lowering his voice, he said, "Did any of that stuff really happen to Scott?"

"He was orphaned, and came under the 'protection' of an infamous scientist, who disguised his true identity and, instead of caring for Scott, treated him as if he was no more than biological tissue for his experiments. When Scott ran away, the man who 'befriended' him abused him to force him to work for him."

"Does he remember it?"

"He remembers enough. I have tried to soften the edges of some of his misuse."

" _Did_ Sabretooth rape him?"

Xavier said, "Scott certainly has no memories of such an event happening."

Logan was relieved to such a knee-weakening degree that he had to rest a hand on the back of the chair to stay upright as he glowered across the table at Xavier. He could still feel that kid's snuffling breaths warm against his neck, his skinny, bruised body shuddering so brokenly against his. There was a part of him that still wanted to go back into that memory and give that boy another hug. He realized that Xavier had probably programmed him to feel that way, the manipulative son-of-a-bitch. 

It was all he could do to keep his claws in as he said savagely, "You had _no right_ to put those thoughts in my head. Don't you have any loyalty to Scott? I'm the last guy on the planet he would want knowing what was done to him when he was a scared kid."

"For the sake of argument, let’s call that boy a composite with Scott’s mutation and name who could have been Scott. He could have been any one of far too many mutant children who end up unwanted and neglected because society doesn't care what becomes of them. If you're going to stay here, Logan – and I hope you will – I need you to be the man who climbed in through that window and risked being branded a kidnapper or worse to help that imaginary Scott."

The images had been too vivid for him to shake this off as a life lesson. He was still reverberating from that scared kid's pain; a part of him still wanting to keep the boy safe even though he'd never even existed; at least, not quite like that. He wondered if Xavier, in all his great wisdom, knew how angry Logan was with him right now.

Xavier said, "Do you want to know how Scott got away from that compound, Logan?"

"The only thing I want to know is where the hell you get off on mind-fucking people who you keep asking to trust you?"

"It was because when Scott was Stryker's prisoner, an angry mutant with adamantium claws broke out of the facility where Scott was being held captive, and set him and the other mutant children free."

"I don't remember saving any mutant kids from a compound and even if I did I was probably thinking about something else at the time."

"That doesn't mean you didn't do it."

It occurred to Logan, belatedly and very unpleasantly, that all Xavier had told him was that Scott had no memories of being raped by Sabretooth, not that it hadn't happened. He knew he ought to ask for clarification, but the truth was that he didn't want to know, and, what was more, he didn't have the right to know more than Scott did about his own life. He might want to steal his girlfriend but he didn't want to gatecrash his past.

Logan glared at Xavier. "You just put a whole memory in my head of an event that never happened. Why should I believe anything you tell me?"

Xavier said patiently, "Because I'm not manipulating you or putting any memories, false or otherwise, in your mind right now. I'm telling you a simple truth. Scott owes you a lot more than he knows, Logan."

"You haven't told him that?"

"I saw no reason to do so. It would only bring up unpleasant memories for him, and his instinct would always be to save you anyway. It's the way he is."

Logan narrowed his eyes. "I wouldn't get too smug about your child-rearing abilities, Professor. Some of these kids are going to go dark side, whatever you do, and if that fake memory was even half-true, then Scott was trying to do the right thing before you ever started training him to be an X-Man."

Mildly, Xavier said, "It seems Jean was right about you."

"What did she say?"

"That you might be a lot smarter than you look. Scott, I regret to say, is still unconvinced on that score."

Logan backed towards the door and stabbed a finger at Xavier. "You can mindscrew everyone else in this damned school but you're not doing it to me."

"I wouldn't dream of it," Xavier assured him, shamelessly.

"Don't think I'm going to walk out of here and go play nice with Cyclops just because all of his Daddy substitutes turned out to be manipulative creeps – and I'm including you in that."

"I never imagined that you would." Nothing could have been blander than Xavier's tone.

Logan growled, stormed out, and found Cyclops striding along the corridor, looking tall and handsome, more than able to take care of himself in any situation, and the picture of good mental health. Logan snarled, "I'm borrowing your bike," and kept walking. Something – and he resisted it for a full five seconds – made him turn around and catch up with Cyclops. "If that's okay with you?" he muttered.

Cyclops looked at him as if had sprouted an extra head, and then said in his best talking-to-crazy-people voice, "That's okay with me, Logan, as long as you don't kill too many people while riding it."

"I'll try to keep fatalities down to single figures."

"I appreciate it."

They stood in the corridor staring at each other, and, damn, Xavier had done way too good a job of implanting that image of scared, skinny, kid-Cyclops, because when he looked at this guy's blandly handsome, perfectly self-assured surface, he could see that boy just underneath. He could even remember the way he'd smelt and sounded, and the way those bruises and welts had looked across his narrow shoulders. 

Cyclops said in concern, "Are you okay, Logan?"

"Fine!" He swung on his heel. Out of nowhere, he found himself snarling, "Don't do anything dangerous until I get back."

Cyclops's visored face was somehow still registering complete disbelief. "What?"

Logan stabbed a finger at him. "I mean it. No stupid life-risking missions until I'm back and I can…do the heavy-lifting."

"You are such an arrogant –" Cyclops swallowed the rest of that sentence with exemplary self-control but did raise his visor to the heavens, presumably asking for the patience of a saint or perhaps just hoping for a passing thunderbolt to strike down his tormentor. With a visible effort to be reasonable, he said, "So – what, does that mean you're sticking around?"

"Yeah, I'm sticking around!"

"Well…good."

"Glad you're so excited."

Nothing could have been more expressionless than Cyclops as he said, "This is my happy face."

As Logan stormed towards the underground garage, he added, in case Cyclops really hadn't taken in the whole don't-go-on-a-dangerous-mission-without-me part of the way things now needed to be, "I'll be back in two hours. Try not to get yourself killed in the meantime."

"Well, make sure you come back via a gas station this time!" 

Logan glanced over his shoulder to see Cyclops shaking his head, and almost certainly rolling his eyes behind that visor, before marching into Xavier's room. Logan could just hear him saying plaintively, "Professor, do you think Logan's healing factor rules out the possibility of him being on mood-altering drugs, because I'm not convinced –?"

Logan shook his head. Xavier had totally mind-fucked him, and he had done exactly what Xavier wanted him to do as a consequence: get all over-protective and over-invested in the guy he didn't like whose girlfriend he really wanted to steal. It was going to be a while before Logan could shake off that feeling of wanting-to-keep-that-poor-abused-boy-now-grown-up-safe whenever he looked at Cyclops, and by that point, the annoying preppy uptight asshole would probably have won him over anyway. 

However, on the plus side, it did show that there was a lot more hope for Charles Xavier than Logan had been thinking. Maybe Xavier was always going to forgive Magneto, and protect the humans, even the humans who hated them, and generally be an annoying super-mutant do-gooder, but there was also a bit of manipulative, self-serving son-of-a-bitch in there, too. And if, when it came to the protection of his chosen kids, Xavier was a guy who was ready to throw ethics on the bonfire and toast a few marshmallows in the subsequent blaze, well, as a guy who had crossed a few moral boundaries in his time to get things done, that just made Charles Xavier someone that Logan could work with.

It also meant that these kids of Xavier's might not be so irredeemably goody-goody that there was no saving them, and could still be taught the mutant equivalent of the low blow, the swiftly raised knee, and letting the Marquess of Queensbury rules be for the other guy. Cyclops would, of course, be fighting Logan every step of the way on all those issues, but, Cyclops was only a few years past being a kid himself and had apparently been raised by one slimeball after another – so, hell, there was probably even hope for him, too, if Logan could just teach him the health advantages of losing his temper from time to time. Not that he wanted to be molding and shaping impressionable young minds but if he was going to end up doing it anyway, he'd like to think there was a chance of molding and shaping them so their bodies had a chance of coming out of a battle in one piece. 

Maybe that was the real reason for him to stick around – to be the dissenting voice when everyone else was going along with Xavier. Maybe, Xavier was aware himself that Scott Summers, given his incredibly shitty childhood, was probably never going to be his most objective critic, and that a different viewpoint could be beneficial. Cyclops was going to hate that, of course, but then Cyclops was just going to have to suck it up, because Logan was now invested in him not getting himself killed, along with all the other mutant kids. And, maybe, this whole mindfuck had been about putting Logan in the same position that Xavier was – of having to look at those highly-trained, super-charged, leather-clad warriors and send them out on a dangerous mission while having to remember how they'd looked as children. And maybe, if something happened to Xavier, there needed to be another grown-up around, who wasn't a pacifist or an idealist and who didn't mind getting his hands dirty, because when you got down to the bedrock, much as Charles Xavier wanted to leave the world a better place than he'd found it, he also wanted the kids he'd loved and raised to have a chance to live in that better world they'd all suffered so much to create. Which meant that Logan and Xavier were on a lot more of the same wavelength than Logan had ever realized.

He felt Xavier tentatively waiting at the outside of his mind, asking for an invite this time. _May I?_

_Scott's going to hate me being on his team_ , Logan thought back without preamble. 

_Well, I would appreciate it if you tried not to elevate his blood pressure too much._

_I didn't ask to carry the bald mutant's burden, Professor. If you're going to land me with ultimate responsibility for keeping your little freaks alive, I'm going to do it my way. I'm going to break rules and make up new ones and then I'm going to change the ones I just made up._

_Erik never had the option of **not** seeing the people he loved herded into death camps, Logan. I'd like to see out what remains of my life without ever having to witness another human or mutant genocide. At this point, I'm willing to listen to another point of view._

_Good, because that's what you're going to get – loudly and often._

_I love all my children, but Jean and Scott were the first. They have a special place in my heart. If harm comes to me, I need someone to help them through it, and help Scott, in particular, because when he's grieving he's not necessarily rational, and he certainly would never keep himself safe. You, however, are both compassionate and…forthright enough to make him get through it, whether he wants to or not. What I did to you earlier, I didn't do lightly, but I needed you to understand…everything._

Xavier withdrew and Logan got it, and how. Xavier hadn't just wanted him to know that Scott was vulnerable; he'd wanted him to know that the horribly damaged structure upon which his apparently impregnable surface was built, might, if the wrong pressure were applied, utterly give way. Great, so stick-up-his-ass-boy wasn't just a dull heroic control freak, he was a dull heroic control freak who might one day lose it to the power of about two gigawatts. Well, good to know. Nice conference call. Where was the exit again? 

But, of course, he wasn't going anywhere now. Xavier had seen to that. He'd shown him around the magnificent mansion and let him see how well-trained and well-funded and well-prepared they were and why, therefore, Logan should join the rational, organized, functional team, not those amateur crazies of Magneto's, and then he'd thrown in that little Oh by the way…about his X-Men all having been fucked-up, unloved, unwanted, much-abused mutant kids not that long ago, and still being those fucked-up mutant kids on the inside even now. Because, obviously, Logan had a great track record when it came to _not_ getting much too fond, much too fast, of fucked-up mutant kids. 

Yeah, he hadn't been blindsided by a master at all.

Aloud, Logan said, "Xavier, you're a mind-raping manipulative douchebag and I ought to deck you the first chance I get."

What he did, however, was take Cyclop's motorbike for a ride – which was, of course, no pleasure at all now that he'd asked for and received permission to do so – and then drive back home again, to the place he was now committed to living in, with all the life-damaged kids, and their hormones and their homework, and imperfectly-controlled mutations, and their hopes and dreams and stupid crushes and endless frickin' issues. The only possible consolation being the thought that in his case he really might have done something very bad in a previous life for which he needed to atone. 

But the worst part of it all was that he'd stopped off at a gas station on his way back and filled Cyclops' bike up with gas. He was definitely charging that to Xavier.

##### End


End file.
